A Brief History of NoSQL

NoSQL is getting a lot of traction and hype these days but in reality it’s not that new of a thing. I thought I’d trace the roots of NoSQL and see what I’d find. The name “NoSQL” was in fact first used by Carlo Strozzi in 1998 as the name of file-based database he was developing. Ironically it’s relational database just one without a SQL interface. As such it is not actually a part of the whole NoSQL movement we see today. The term re-surfaced in 2009 when Eric Evans used it to name the current surge in non-relational databases. It seems like the name has stuck for better or for worse. Note that not all projects are included in this post. See the post on analyzing the NoSQL landscape for a more complete listing.

1980’s

NDBM was the Berkeley version of DBM supporting having multiple databases open at the same time.

SDBM - another clone of DBM mainly for licensing reasons.

GT.M is the first version of a key-value store with focus on high performance transaction processing. It is open sourced in 2000.

BerkeleyDB is created at Berkeley in the transition from 4.3BSD to 4.4BSD. Sleepycat software is started as a company in 1996 when Netscape needed new features for BerkeleyDB. Later acquired by Oracle which still sell and maintain BerkeleyDB.

Lotus Notes or rather the server part, Lotus Domino, which really is a document database has it’s initial release in 1989, now sold by IBM. It has evolved a lot from the early versions and is now a full office and collaboration suite.

1990’s

Mnesia is developed by Ericsson as a soft real-time database to be used in telecom. It is relational in nature but does not use SQL as query language but rather Erlang itself.

InterSystems Caché launched in 1997 and is a hybrid so-called post-relational database. It has object interfaces, SQL, PICK/MultiValue and direct manipulation of data structures. It is a M[umps] implementation. See Scott Jones comment below for more on the history of InterSystems

Metakit is started in 1997 and is probably the first document oriented database. Supports smaller datasets than the ones in vogue nowadays.

2000-2005

This is were the NoSQL train really picks up some momentum and a lot is starting to happen.

Eric Evans of Rackspace, a committer on the Cassandra project, introduces the term “NoSQL” often used in the sense of “Not only SQL” to describe the surge of new projects and products.

(Some of these dates need to be taken with a small pinch of salt as finding out exactly when the projects started can be a bit difficult. Also not all projects started in last few years have been included)

In 2009 and 2010 we also saw the coming of NoSQL conferences like NoSQL live in Boston in 2010, the upcoming NoSQL eu in London in April 2010. Last year we also saw the NoSQL east conference in Atlanta.